Tuesday, March 17, 2015

An Honest Discussion Of Race Includes Discussing The Race-Baiters

This president has been a disaster, which I expected--but I didn't expect him to be a disaster in race relations, which every poll has shown have gotten worse during his time in office. Think of his response to Cornel West's run-in with the police (they acted "stupidly"), his involvement in the Trayvon Martin imbroglio (if he had a son, he'd have looked like Trayvon), and the Ferguson, MO riots:

The most recent news from Ferguson concerns what Eric Holder
has rightly called the “ambush shooting” of two police officers outside
the city’s police department. This incident occurred in the wake of two
detailed reports released by the Department of Justice. The first report deals in depth with the shooting of Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson....

Let’s start with the DOJ report that exonerated Wilson. The federal
prosecutors ran an exhaustive review of all the physical, forensic, and
testimonial evidence in the case. It is necessary to state its final
conclusion in full: “Darren Wilson’s actions do not constitute
prosecutable violations under the applicable federal criminal civil
rights statute, 18 U.S.C. § 242, which prohibits uses of deadly force
that are ‘objectively unreasonable,’ as defined by the United States
Supreme Court. The evidence, when viewed as a whole, does not support
the conclusion that Wilson’s uses of deadly force were “objectively
unreasonable” under the Supreme Court’s definition. Accordingly, under
the governing federal law and relevant standards set forth in the USAM
[United States Attorneys’ Manual], it is not appropriate to present this
matter to a federal grand jury for indictment, and it should therefore
be closed without prosecution.”

The legal conclusion is surely correct, but the tone of the report’s
findings are slanted against Wilson. It is not just the case that there
is insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution. It is that,
beyond a reasonable doubt, the evidence supports that Wilson’s conduct
was fully justified. During the initial encounter, Brown had tried to
wrest Wilson’s gun from him by reaching into Wilson’s Chevy Tahoe SUV.
Wilson’s story was corroborated, to quote the report, “by bruising on
Wilson’s jaw and scratches on his neck, the presence of Brown’s DNA on
Wilson’s collar, shirt, and pants, and Wilson’s DNA on Brown’s palm.”
Later on, the evidence also showed that Brown was running toward Wilson
at the time Wilson fired the fatal shots, not knowing whether Brown was
armed or not. The incident was far clearer than the oft-ticklish
situations in which the courts have to decide whether a police officer
used excessive force against a person who was resisting arrest, as with
the controversial grand jury decision not to indict any police officer for the killing of Eric Garner.

What the DOJ now has to do is to acknowledge that the killing of
Michael Brown was a justifiable homicide. It must abandon its contrived
legalisms and defend Wilson, by condemning unequivocally the entire
misguided campaign
against him, which resulted in threats against his life and forced his
resignation from the police force. Eric Holder owes Wilson an apology
for the unnecessary anguish that Wilson has suffered. As the Attorney
General for all Americans, he must tell the protestors once and for all
that their campaign has been thoroughly misguided from start to finish,
and that their continued protests should stop in the interests of civic
peace and racial harmony. In light of the past vilification of Wilson,
it is not enough for the DOJ to publish the report, and not trumpet its
conclusions. It is necessary to put that report front and center in the
public debate so that everyone now understands that Wilson behaved
properly throughout the entire incident.

In other words, "hands up, don't shoot" was a lie from the beginning, but it was aided and encouraged by a black president and a black attorney general for reasons too sick to tolerate. When the attorney general said, early in his tenure, that America is a nation of cowards because it doesn't talk about race, I say we're just the opposite--too many people talk too much about race and nothing else.

It's not 1957 anymore. The president and the attorney general should join the rest of us in the 21st century.

2 comments:

I agree with you about the tone of the report … but, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Holder make a statement much closer to exonerating Darren Wilson? Of course, we can't forget that he also flew down to Ferguson to jump to the conclusion that he was guilty -- something which he did not do when the two officers got shot. That only warranted a statement from afar -- and, a preliminary statement that (despite the proximity to the protest and the targets) that it may not have been related to the protest … really? Am I an idiot? So I'm not carrying Holder's water, but I do believe he came as close to an apology as one might expect. Doesn't help Officer Wilson, though -- he still had to resign and move.

The issue is the public perception and how it differs based on age, sex or race. All professions have their bad actors. That being said, when someone tries to convince me the government is covering up for Wilson, I ask them pointedly if they really believe the Dept. of Justice, run by Eric Holder under the auspices of President Obama would blindly exonerate Officer Wilson if there was even on speck of guilt? Either you believe Wilson is innocent or you believe Obama and Holder are guilty of a racist cover up. There is no middle ground.